Controlling the nature of a charged impurity in a bath of Feshbach dimers

Abstract

We theoretically study the dynamics of a trapped ion that is immersed in an ultracold gas of weakly bound atomic dimers created by a Feshbach resonance. Using quasi-classical simulations, we find a crossover from dimer dissociation to molecular ion formation depending on the binding energy of the dimers. The location of the crossover strongly depends on the collision energy and the time-dependent fields of the Paul trap. Deeply bound dimers lead to fast molecular ion formation, with rates approaching the Langevin collision rate ${\Gamma }_{\text{L}}^{\prime }\approx 4.8\times 10^{-9}$cm${}^3$s${}^{-1}$. The kinetic energies of the created molecular ions have a median below $1$mK, such that they will stay confined in the ion trap. We conclude that interacting ions and Feshbach molecules may provide a novel approach towards the creation of ultracold molecular ions with applications in precision spectroscopy and quantum chemistry.

9 pages and 12 figures including appendices

References in corpus (4)

• A trapped single ion inside a Bose-Einstein condensate
• Cold interactions between an Yb${}^{+}$ ion and a Li atom: Prospects for sympathetic cooling, radiative association, and Feshbach resonances
• Scanning tunnelling microscopy for ultracold atoms
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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Ultracold ion-atom experiments: cooling, chemistry, and quantum effects
• Rydberg atom-ion collisions in cold environments
• Experimental setup for studying an ultracold mixture of trapped Yb${}^{+}$-${}^6$Li
• Ion-atom-atom three-body recombination in cold hydrogen and deuterium plasmas
• Electric field dissociation of weakly bound molecular ions